Donald, Nancy and Chuck prove to be lousy sausage-makers

John Kass

Contributing Writer

Before we get into all the liberal media hysteria over the government shutdown and the southern border, and Donald, Nancy and Chuck hissing at one another while avoiding a workable compromise sitting right in front of their noses, a word about sausage-making.

Yes. Sausage-making.

Because what they’re doing in Washington — with all their hot shouting, blistering virtue-signaling and scorching shrieks and national temperature-raising over the government shutdown — is unfortunately being called sausage-making.

Here’s a fact check: Screaming and shouting and encouraging the media into the usual bleating hysterics isn’t sausage-making.

Some dumb politician — or maybe a crooked journalist who never held an honest job in a meat cooler — made up that idiotic cliche about politics being like sausage-making years ago.

But I’ve stood for hours in a freezing meat cooler, sawdust at my feet, making sausage for my father at our family supermarket. I wasn’t alone.

Spending hours pushing spiced meats and various fats through a grinder is excellent training for political journalism.

If you keep your head clear and cold, you won’t lose a hand. And if you concentrate, you’ll make the customer happy.

A butcher wants it cold to work the meat. But politicians want things hot. Clearly, they know nothing of good sausage.

And so here we are, with Republican President Donald Trump and his two Democratic foils, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, seemingly trying to make sausage in public but making a steaming hash of it all.

The meat: Trump wants $5.6 billion federal money for a wall on the southern border. Schumer and Pelosi, who’ve supported border barriers in the past, now say the president is all about “fearmongering” and that a wall is “immoral.” Trump shuts down the government.

The fat: Predictably, the media freaks out, with liberal pundits insisting that what’s going on along the southern border isn’t a crisis, just Trumpian rhetoric. But then many of the same geniuses told us that the caravan coming up from Central America wasn’t real, until it was.

The casing: Pelosi and Schumer want Trump to capitulate and reopen the government, and after that’s done and he’s given away any leverage, they promise they’ll continue negotiating on border security.

If Trump and the Republicans believe that Schumer and Pelosi will negotiate on border security after Trump caves on a shutdown, the Republicans are dumber than liberal pundits insist.

The spice: There could be a compromise in all of this, but U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the hard political left aren’t really interested in compromise. They’re interested in power and pushing the Democratic establishment types out of the way.

Perhaps this is why an old-timer like Pelosi has that bothersome “Eyes Wide Shut” expression, as if staring into headlights. But I wonder if she sees anything at all.

The last thing the Democrats want from all of this is something Trump mentioned in his speech from the Oval Office the other night: In terms of jobs and wages, unskilled African-American workers are vulnerable to economic pressure from undocumented immigrants. They compete for the same jobs.